Smogon Premier League - Introduction

The Smogon Premier League (or SPL as its lovingly called) is a project that I came up with almost a year back. It was, in my opinion, the most exciting concept for a tournament yet. Sadly though, we weren't able to get it going due to a number of factors.

Fast forward to a couple of months back when LonelyNess put in the work to revive it and this time, its actually happening.

Without wasting any more time, here's what the SPL is all about:

The Concept

In the SPL, 10 teams consisting of the best players we have today participate in a league type tournament which lasts for a duration of 9 weeks. After that, the top 4 teams enter a knockout stage, with the winners becoming the champion of that season.

Each team has to consist of a minimum of 10 players, going up to any number they wish (there are some limitations here, which I'll talk about later).

Over the course of the tournament, teams face each other in head to head matches with 8 players per side who 'play' in the matches. This tournament encompasses A number of 'generations' of pokemon and each pairing has the following matches:

Each week, the team manager will mail the hosts (in this case, LonelyNess and myself) the team they are playing that week. If you know someone will be busy and/or unable to finish their battle that week, you have substitutions you can make. There are no caps on subs so players can move around in various roles as the manager sees fit.

Before I explain how the points system works or how a team goes about qualifying for the semi's, I'll take you through how exactly these teams are going to be formed.

Managers

Managers are one of the most important parts of a team. We'll be posting a manager signup thread in a few days, if you want to be a manager, apply then, not in this thread. Managers however, will be handpicked by us as we're only willing to let people who we know will put in the time and the effort into this manage the game.

Another thing to note is that managers cannot actually play for a team, so if you want to actually play in the tournament, you can't be a manager.

Managers are the people who in essence run the teams. They decide who plays on it, who plays what position and even handles the team finances (yes, finances, keep reading!).

Managers also makes sure the team keeps running on a day to day basis. If a team fails to complete their matches by the end of the allotted time, the onus is on the manager to inform as to why this happened.

The most important thing they do is actually signing the players which is done using the following system:

The Auction

Once we've picked the 10 managers for this season, we shall open up a signup thread where people can sign up for playing in the league. A signup post should look like this:

Name: Shiv
Roles: RBY OU, ADV OU
Timezone: GMT+8

Click to expand...

It must contain all three of those fields. Once the signup thread has been running for about a week or so, we'll close new entries and create a list of freelance players.

At this point, each manager will receive 100,000 credits as initial capital for their team. Using these credits, managers can bid on players in order to "sign" them for the current season. There is a minimum bid of 3,000 on a player. However, there is no maximum cap, so make sure you don't overbid on a player. There is also a minimum raise of 500 credits per bid to prevent people from wasting time increasing bids by 1 credit.

Players go to the highest bidder, personal preferences aren't taken into account here. That is, if Player A wants to play for Manager B but Manager C bids 10,000 credits, Manager B will have to put up the money to sign Player A. This is to make sure that the process is as fair as possible and players don't sign with friends for very cheap.

In addition, mid-season transfers will be allowed. There will be a week in between where managers could trade players however they wish. However, players will be paid the "amount" that was bid on them in the initial auction itself. In addition, new players could join at this stage as well, following a similar bidding system to decide who gets them.

Do remember though, you only get 100,000 at the start of the season. You don't get more for the mid-season window so a manager could decide to go all out at the start or instead decide to save some for the mid-season period.

Any credits left over will be carried over to the next season of the SPL. At the beginning of each season, each team as the option of retaining their players at the cost of 25% of their salary. That is, if I signed Jackal for 10,000 in season 1, I'll be paying 12,500 for him in season 2 otherwise he'll become a free agent. The rest of the players (and new signups of course) will become free agents and another auction round will occur.

Bidding shall last as long as it takes for all the managers to spend all their credits, which should be in about a week.

An example of bidding would be as follows:

At first there is just a list of players. Mangers will send PMs bidding on what players they want for various amounts.

So let's say that there has been a single day's worth of bidding, the thread will be updated as often as possible so that manager's know exactly how much the current high bid is. (the original poster should be someone who is active fairly regularly throughout the day) The list may look something like this:

And thus if bidding were to end right there, purple team would own hanke.

There will obviously be lists of free agents for each tier.

Format

As mentioned before, teams will take on each other in head to head matches. Each team will face all the others once in the league stages. In each matchup, 8 players play in a variety of styles, these are:

In the league stages, beating another team gives you 3 points, drawing the match (4 wins vs 4 wins) gives you 1 point and losing it gives you nothing. In addition, the manner in which you win will also be stored, that is, how many you won vs how many you lost. This difference will be used in case of a tie at the end of the league stage.

In case of a 4-4 tie in the semi finals or finals, teams will compete in a series of 3 tiebreakers: one in DP OU, one in ADV OU and one in GSC OU.

Just the fact that you were on the winning team, in what is most definitely one of the most competitive tournaments on Smogon should be enough for most of you! If not, well, you can finally say you won an official Smogon tournament!

A few things to note...

Do remember that this is not a signup thread though if you've read so far and not understood that yet, I doubt this will help. However, you can feel free to comment and tell us how amazing the idea is or alternatively, how this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard off and I should go jump off a cliff for doing this.

In addition, feel free to contact either LonelyNess or myself about any questions you may have about the SPL.

Also, if you want to brush up your RBY, GSC or ADV skills, you can use the Netbattle Server we've set up, the address is smogonpl.zapto.org.

Lastly, there's a IRC channel set up in case you're already pumped for it and want to talk shit, so join us at #SPL on irc.synirc.net.

This sounds awesome, but how do you do the older generations? Shoddy 2 sounds like they won't get them up yet for a while and I can't see everyone fleeing to Netbattle to do this, unless it's a pure wi-fi tourney, but even then that would seem hard to organize.

Moderator

For those of you wanting to brush up on your RBY / GSC / RSE skills, feel free to come on to the official Smogon Premier League Netbattle server, hosted 24 hours a day (or close to it) by yours truly, LonelyNess!

If the registry is down, you can join by using the following advanced connection: